"If I had to show a foreigner one English city and one only, to give him a balanced idea of English architecture," wrote the eminent architectural historian John Summerson, "I should take him to Bristol, which has developed in all directions, and where nearly everything has happened."

It is a rich and varied heritage that the city's new architect mayor, George Ferguson, is only too aware of – and a legacy he is keen to build on. Known for his trademark red trousers, the brightness of which appear to be an accurate measure of his own vigour, the 65-year-old has big plans for the city.

"I'm saying Bristol is a laboratory for change," he told a gaggle of assembled architects at the New London Architecture centre last week. "We are a test bed: come and try it and help me change it."

The former president of the RIBA was introduced as a "one-man regeneration machine" and a "model for architects to be more entrepreneurial". As partner of practice Ferguson Mann, he masterminded the transformation of the city's old Imperial Tobacco Factory in the 1990s into a mixed-use pleasure palace, with a restaurant, bar, performing arts school, loft apartments (including his own), offices and a theatre – as well as reviving a nearby brewery as the Bristol Beer Factory, which now produces award-winning ales.

"I am careful not to describe myself as George Ferguson the architect," he said during his election campaign. "I tell people that my occupation is making things happen." Elected mayor in November, and now in charge of a £1bn turnover, Ferguson has ambitions for a lot of things to happen. So what does his vision for the city entail?

"I'm going to be intolerant of bad architecture," he says, describing how the former head of planning was a highways engineer who "let anything and everything through – including office blocks stacked on top of multistorey car parks.

"My idea of good architecture is about creating place. It's not about providing glitzy iconic buildings, competing one against the other, but how we use the best of what we've got."

A primary test bed for his ideas will be the Brunel Mile, a project he first suggested in the 1990s, to connect Temple Meads station with the harbour, currently an inhospitable arrival sequence of a vast roundabout and the roaring dual carriageway of Redcliffe Way.

"It is important that you feel you're being welcomed into the city," he says. "After all, we want people to come back." He is hoping to attract the best architects and urban thinkers to tackle this stretch, with plans for a Barcelona-style boulevard, as well as retrofitting the ailing building stock that lines the route.

"The centre of our neighbourhood is the middle of a car park, which was created as a temporary measure in 1962," Melissa Mean, of the Redcliffe Neighbourhood Development Forum, told the Bristol Post. "It is sliced in half by a four-lane highway that goes nowhere. Roads and car parks dominate so that this key gateway to Bristol resembles a bypass rather than an important part of the city centre's fabric."

While these promising plans for Redcliffe Way look set to evolve incrementally, through a community-driven campaign, there is another project that Ferguson is keen to see built within his first term – of only three and a half years.

"I'm going to launch a competition for a 12,000-seat arena," he proclaimed at the NLA, to the assembled architects' glee. "Bristol is left off the concert map because we are the only city without a proper arena."

He wants it to be the most environmentally-friendly venue ever built, and be conceived as part of the urban fabric, as well as providing a home for Bristol's thriving circus culture. "It shouldn't be a box in a car park, like so many arenas tend to be. It must be outward-looking and animate the space around it, and be really embedded in the city."

Quite how well these grand plans will go down in a city that is also facing £35m of cuts remains to be seen, although Ferguson says he is talking to with the Local Enterprise Partnership about funding for the project. And while three and a half years might seem a little ambitious, he stresses he is taking at least a 25-year view of the city, without sparing a moment's thought for re-election – concluding with the Greek proverb that "we should be prepared to plant trees under the shade of which we will never sit ourselves".

Judging by his track record, he may well get to enjoy the shade, and prove to be the man the city needs to make these long-discussed projects happen.